Tip: printing long documents to OneNote

One of our power users sent me a mail last week noticing a change in the new version of OneNote. If you print a long documents (more than 10 pages) to OneNote, the printer will now break that document out into a new OneNote page for each page of the printout.

This was a common request we received over the years, especially for Powerpoint slides. People want the separate pages to be able to take notes on a big OneNote page. In fact, one of the more popular powertoys was the Printout Manager which took printouts to break them into multiple pages.

But this fellow has a team that has a workflow built on all printed documents going to one single page only. They track expense reports and like to print the receipts to one page. Some of the hotel receipts can apparently get quite large and this new change was interrupting their system.

There is a way to change it back and that is the tip for today. In the Options dialog under the Advanced tab is the control to determine whether you want to split long printouts across multiple pages:

Checking it means that the long documents will span multiple OneNote pages. Unchecking it means to print the entire document to one single page.

So if you want the older behavior, here is where you can get it back. If this helps you, let me know.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2013
  I'm running office professional 2010 32-bit on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit and I do not have that option. I checked system updates  but I'm all up to date.   Is it not out yet for everybody? thanks

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2013
  You can download the trial as of 1/4/2013, and MSDN subscribers can get Office 2013 now.  Also, if you buy a Surface, you get it now.  Sorry for not being more clear.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2013
  The option to choose between these two options is great! However, now I'm wishing I could have both - what if large printouts were on one continuous sheet, but each page of the printout were bookmarked by a OneNote page? This would allow me to easily scroll through a document or click a page to go to a part of the document instantly. I'm a student that takes notes on my professor's PowerPoint slides - if I could "bookmark" pages in such a way, it would streamline my note-taking and make it much easier to find a specific slide from lecture later on.

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2013
  You can sort of do this now.  Go ahead and print the long document to one page, then CTRL+A to select all the pages of the printouts.  Then right click the set of pages and select "Copy link to paragraph"Then paste to the top of that page or a new page.  THen when you click the 4th link from the links that are pasted, you get taken to the 4th page of the printout.That's the good news.  The difficulty here is that all the links are named "Picture on page "<<pagename>" so it may be hard to tell them apart, but you can rename the links as you want.

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2013
  Thank you John,I'm running Onenote 2013 and I had to print long documents on one single page. I couldn't manage to find the right option for that.This was useful.

• Anonymous
  November 30, 2013
  Just what I was after. Have been importing printouts of handwritten notes and much prefer them on one continuous page.Cheers mate.

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2014
  is there any way I can change the amount onenote assumes as a "long document" as I would still like it to print each page of the lectures pdfs onto separate (sub)pages of the lecture, that way I can name what each page is about.  i.e it is currently 10, but I would like to reduce it to 2 or 3. and anything larger to be considered a long document.

• Anonymous
  May 12, 2014
  No, there is no way to alter that value.  I'll pass this along as a suggestion, though.

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2014
  Thank you sooooo much! You have noooo idea how close I was of a breaking point and smashing stuff into the wall lol. I hate when I've got PP presentations broken down into different pages! I absolutely despise that function! Thank you really really much, this is indeed a life saver! :)

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2014
  Thanks. Just what I needed.

• Anonymous
  December 02, 2014
  HiEven tho we have it unchecked, we still get at promt every time asking if we realy want to print the entire dokument to one page. This promt for every document crashes the automatic print-to-onenote program we use. Is there anyway to turn off this promt?

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2015
  Thank you so much for posting this as multiple page printouts don't work for me. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2015
  This awfully implemented 'feature' just caused me a lot of irritation. Suddenly a certain file prints a new page per slide for no apparent reason, despite me selecting in onenote a specific page I want it to print to. If you're going to add an obscure change to printing behaviour don't bury it the advanced options somewhere. Put it in the print dialogue.

• Anonymous
  August 24, 2015
  Wonderful tip.  I didn't know this was an update and thought it had always been that way.  I love the option!

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2015
  I agree with Chariton about the number of pages.  I almost always would want this to be a single OneNote page to page I'm printing.  At least I know that I can just add blank pages to get to the # 10.  Really helpful.

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2016
  Thank you! This is exactly what I have been looking for!